Page 77 of Breaking His Exile

Rainey hadn’t said she was wondering.

“I wasn’t⁠—”

“You were.” Greta turned back from the window and her expression was too sharp and too kind at the same time. “It’s fine. He matters to you. You’d want to know.”

The relief came so fast it was embarrassing. Rainey looked down at her coffee and felt heat crawl up the back of her neck. Eight days on a mountain with this man, and apparently what she’d been quietly, unreasonably jealous of was a wilderness guide with a compass tattoo and good spatial awareness.

She hadn’t even admitted to herself she was jealous until now.

“He mentioned you a lot,” Rainey said. “For a man who doesn’t talk, he mentioned you a lot.”

Greta smiled at that, and it reached her eyes. “He doesn’t have many people. The ones he has, he holds onto.” She pushed off the windowsill. “Don’t let him run, okay? He’ll try. It’s basically his primary hobby at this point.”

Brandt knocked at eleven.

The women cleared out with minimal ceremony. Nessie collected the mugs and the empty plates. Mariah folded the leftover clothes. Gemma gathered the toiletry basket. Maggie squeezed Rainey’s shoulder on the way out, brief and warm, nothing required in return. Greta paused in the doorway and gave Rainey a look that said you’ve got this, without the words.

Naomi stayed. Rainey hadn’t asked out loud, but she’d looked at her, and Naomi had nodded and pulled the chair back to the corner and settled into it with her phone down and her attention up.

Brandt came in and set a small digital recorder on the dresser, a notepad open beside it. He pulled a chair to the center of the room and sat down. No theatrics. No warmup.

“Ready when you are,” he said.

She was.

The Dead Marshall first. She walked him through it clean — the bar, Rux, the knife at her throat, Evander stepping in. How fast it happened. How she’d gotten into Evander’s truck because the alternative was standing in that parking lot alone with Sons coming out the door.

Brandt listened without interrupting. He wrote in the notepad with a shorthand she couldn’t read.

“Back further,” he said. “How did you first come into contact with Malachai Granger?”

Music. Of course it always came back to music.

She told him about meeting Mal at a bar in Billings where she’d been playing a Tuesday night open mic. How he’d introduced himself casually, said he knew people in the industry, that she had something real. How those conversations had stretched into months. How he’d folded her gradually into the club’s orbit, a party here, a gathering there, introduced her around, made her feel like she was being welcomed into something instead of being managed into it.

“When did you understand what the Sons of Sin were?”

“I’d heard of them before I met Mal. I wasn’t completely naive.” She paused. “But Mal made it easy to believe it wasn’t what I knew it was. He was good at that.”

“At what?”

“Making things seem smaller than they were. Safer than they were.” She set her coffee down. “He was good at knowing what you wanted to hear and giving you enough of it that you stopped asking the other questions.”

Brandt nodded. Wrote something. “When did the dynamic change?”

Roy Bishoff. She told him about Bishoff — the accountant, the shell companies, how Bishoff had gotten scared and threatened to cooperate with federal investigators. She told him how Mal had shot him in the back of the head in the club’s back office while she was in the hallway and the door wasn’t fully closed. How she’d stood there with her hand over her mouth while Hobbs walked out past her and didn’t even look at her face.

She told him about Sylvie. How she’d found her shaking in the bathroom ten minutes later, how they’d gotten out through the kitchen while the club was still figuring out what to do with the body.

Brandt’s pen moved steadily.

“I need you to go further back,” he said. “Before Bishoff. Before you witnessed the murder. I need to understand the full scope of your involvement with Granger — personally, not as a witness.”

She looked at the recorder.

She’d known this part was coming. She’d been bracing for it since she’d said Mal’s name to Brandt in the yard last night, the first time she’d said it out loud to a federal officer. But knowing and doing were different things.

“He hit me once,” she said. “Three weeks before Bishoff. We’d argued about something — I was talking about leaving, told him I wanted to go back to playing shows on my own, that I didn’t need the contacts anymore. He backhanded me. Once. Said if I tried to leave it would be the last time I tried anything.” Her voice was steady. She’d decided somewhere on that mountain that if she got a chance to say this, she’d say all of it. “But the hitting — that wasn’t the start of it. That was just the part that finally had a shape I could name.”